Painting the Wainscot

White is an easy colour choice to make when painting.  It's a good backdrop for furniture, it mixes well with other colours.  It's neutral and palette cleansing.  White walls can allow you to draw attention to other features in a room.  We painted our piano room white at first.  I make the choice sound profound now but really I think there was just some extra paint in the basement that sealed the deal for us.

I thought white would contrast well with all the dark wood work in this room.  The wood made everything appear much darker and smaller than this room really was.  The light colour in contrast I felt would brighten the room up and show it off.  Although we didn't stick with white I'm glad we did this first because it gave me a chance to see the room, not as the previous owner decorated it, but in a more neutral manner and assess it's positive and negative points.  One of the details that came to light was the extra band of wood several inches above the wainscot.  This had been used to create an accent colour on the walls but once again, this wasn't an original detail and it wasn't one we were keen on.  Goodbye rail!

The top rail was removed so only the wainscot was left.

It was about this point that differences in opinion arose.  Wainscot is something that really appeals to me.  I love that look of paneled walls but hubby was not impressed.  He pointed out that, once again, it wasn't original!  How could that be?  What the heck was original in this house anyway?  The boards as you can clearly see in the above photo were short.  In traditional construction that would never have happened.  We use short boards today because we are more careful about our wood consumption and use as much of a tree as possible.  In traditional construction only perfect boards would have been used.  They had a surplus of wood a hundred years ago when north america was still overflowing with resources.  Using wood that wasn't the correct size or had knots in it was unheard of.  Imperfect wood went straight into the fire.  Despite the arguments I was still reluctant to see this go so a compromise was made.  We painted it.

A dark cream colour to offset the bright white above.  And it looked pretty darn good I think.  The short boards and the knots were no longer as noticeable.  The room now looked bright and cheery and appeared considerably larger to the eye than it had with the dark greens and browns of before.

And at that point we declared the room 'finished' for a time.  At least until summer and humidity came calling.